Information overload - Americans as voracious data consumers

Obesity on account of excessive calorie consumption is a well known pandemic in the US. However, research by the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), is now throwing light on a little known fact that American's don't just gorge on calories alone. They gorge on data as well, a bit here, a byte there – but not in terms of gigabytes (GB), rather in terms of zettabytes (ZB), or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Just how much information is too much? A research paper titled “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers” published by UCSD says that in 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day, totalling 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.

A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. USCD says that these estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). What is even more important is that information at work is not included in this count.

USCD defined "information" as flows of data delivered to people and we measured the bytes, words, and hours of consumer information. Video sources (moving pictures) dominate bytes of information, with 1.3 zettabytes from television and approximately 2 zettabytes of computer games. If hours or words are used as the measurement, information sources are more widely distributed, with substantial amounts from radio, Internet browsing, and others. USCD is quick to clarify that all these numbers, the result of all that research, are but mere estimates.

Previous USCD and other studies of information have reported much lower quantities. Two previous How Much Information? studies, by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian in 2000 and 2003, analyzed the quantity of original content created, rather than what was consumed. A more recent study measured consumption, but estimated that only .3 zettabytes were consumed worldwide in 2007.

The study says that hours of information consumption grew at 2.6 percent per year from 1980 to 2008, due to a combination of population growth and increasing hours per capita, from 7.4 to 11.8. More surprising is that information consumption in bytes increased at only 5.4 percent per year. Yet the capacity to process data has been driven by Moore's Law, rising at least 30 percent per year. One reason for the slow growth in bytes is that color TV changed little over that period. High-definition TV is increasing the number of bytes in TV programs, but slowly.

The traditional media of radio and TV still dominate our consumption per day, with a total of 60 percent of the hours. In total, more than three-quarters of US households' information time is spent with non-computer sources.

Despite this, computers have had major effects on some aspects of information consumption, the study says. In the past, information consumption was overwhelmingly passive, with telephone being the only interactive medium. Thanks to computers, a full third of words and more than half of bytes are now received interactively. Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet.